I walked around the perimeter of our property today and I was enjoying the silence a Sunday afternoon brings. The sun was slowly setting in the western sky and was shining brightly on the ripening sorghum and the flourishing cotton. I grabbed my camera and thought of you guys who live in the city and I wondered if I would ever be able to live in a busy city. I don't know, but there's something about sitting in crop of corn with stalks raised high in the sky, the wind rustling through the leaves. Something about watching the crop dusters flying 200ft above your house. Something about the cotton harvest when everyone in the whole district are working to achieve the same goal. Something about the joy of seeing rows of tiny little shoots popping their heads up after planting. I have grown up with this and I don't think I'll be able to live in any other way.
The reason I have made this thread is to complete the other side of the picture, to complement the street thread. I love looking at the street thread because it's new to me, stuff I don't normally see. So I wanted to do the same for you, to show you stuff you mightn't normally see.

I want everyone that has a picture that shows the essence of farming to join in and add it to the thread. Be it fruit growing, cattle stock, tree farming- anything that has to do with the country. Let's show our city friends our life.

I'll start off with a few from my walk and I'll add more as we progress.

Hey Barrie, nice to hear from you. It's been awhile.
The cotton crops here at the moment are beautiful. Much better shape than it was last year when the floods were around. Most are irrigating at the moment so they are often up at strange hours in the night starting new syphons.

I'm glad you have joined in the photo collection. Your pictures are even different to what i see here. Four instance the plow behind the tractor is only the width of the tractor. If we had that here, the farmer wouldn't get much done each day so our implements are 8-12 metres in width.

QUOTE=grebeman;203298]A few from last autumn, when it was drier, showing ploughing and harrowing prior to sowing a winter grown crop

Hey Barrie, nice to hear from you. It's been awhile.
The cotton crops here at the moment are beautiful. Much better shape than it was last year when the floods were around. Most are irrigating at the moment so they are often up at strange hours in the night starting new syphons.

I'm glad you have joined in the photo collection. Your pictures are even different to what i see here. Four instance the plow behind the tractor is only the width of the tractor. If we had that here, the farmer wouldn't get much done each day so our implements are 8-12 metres in width.

Click to expand...

Brady, It's good to be back and seeing more from your side of the world. These two pictures might explain why the implements here abouts are smaller (narrower) than you are used to.

A typical Devon farm lane

The main road, and I mean A class, through my village (on a very wet day)

Both of these show what we're up against here abouts, some of our hard top roads aren't much wider than that farm track, so farmers are restricted in the size of agricultural kit they can use. Also our land tends to be hillier and historically field sizes were much smaller. These days many hedges have been grubbed out and field sizes increased. One 100 acre farm (40 hectares) that I used to visit regularly had 21 fields, all with hedges around them such as on the right hand side of the farm track photograph, and ranged in height from sea level to 300 feet, so pretty up and down. That's a bit extreme, but few very large fields round here.

Start Farm is at the end of the road, go any further and you drop into the English Channel. The usual Devon mixed farm with some arable and a beef herd.
The farm buildings are sheltered in a fold of the land on what is a very windswept peninsula. Behind stand the twin 450 feet tall masts of the BBC Start Point transmitter which began broadcasting in 1939.

Panasonic GF1 with 20mm f/1.7

The cattle have heard the farmer drive across the field with bales of hay so are moving to catch him up in the hope of some supplement to their diet. Brady this shot should give you some idea of the undulating nature of my county, Devon, and why it's more suited to mixed farming with both livestock and arable on the same farm. You can see the sort of average field sizes and just how the land is folded with many valleys.

Sorry, these are not :43:, originals, but scanned in from photographs taken on a Leica M3 in late October 1979 showing goat and sheep herding in the western Himalayas, in the province of Himachal Pradesh.

A herdsman

What looks like a mixed flock of sheep and goats in the Kulu valley

Goats being herded over the Rohtang pass at 12,975 feet above sea level, coming down from the high pastures for the winter.

Before the coming of mechanised power man relied on the working horse.

The introduction of steam to the land increased the amount of work that could be done in one day. Here a pair of Fowler K7 compound ploughing engines demonstrate the use of a tine cultivator.

Here the winding cable of this engine is slack and will be payed out as the engine on the other side of the field pulls the cultivator across the field and away from this engine.

The cultivator begins its journey across the field being pulled by the engine on the opposite side of the field.

The engine drivers communicate with one another by whistle, when the cultivator reached the other side of the field the driver of that engine slackened off the winding cable and moved his engine forward. He then whistled to the other engine which gentle took up the slack, turning the cultivator round. Then the cultivator was pulled back across the field. The operator on the cultivator steers the machine and lifts and drops the tines.

The cable of the nearside engine is now taut, indicating that it is pulling the cultivator towards it. The engine is driving the winding drum located beneath the boiler. The engine on the other side of the field will have its cable coiling mechanism on the other side, so one engine of the pair is left handed, the other right handed. Such engines were almost invariably bought as a pair to work together.

I'm pleased you brought this back up Barrie, I had nearly forgotten about it.

As you know I love steam engines and have built a few model stationary engines myself. So I've heard of this way of cultivating before but had never seen it in pictures. Thanks for the documentary. I never realized the guy on the plow actually steered it. I wonder if this plowing technique was invented by Brunel?

The engines would be coal fired in the UK, however for the export market I believe that some might have been fired with other fuels, such as left over sugar cane and the likes, although they would have required bigger fireboxes to obtain the same power output, and the ability to accommodate that in the design of the engines would have been limited.

I doubt that Brunel had any input, although he had built a steam powered dredger for Bridgwater (Somerset) docks in, I think 1846, that actually pulled itself from side to side across the dock basin using a wire rope, so a similar principle in effect.